Hardline Islam, Vamoose: In Landmark Decision, Bangladesh Poll Commission Cancels Jamaat-e-Islami’s Registration 

The Bangladesh Election Commission formally scrapped Jamaat-e-Islami, a hardline Islamist party's registration on Monday. A crucial ally of jailed former prime minister Khaleda Zia's Opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), revoking of the licence comes five years after the Supreme Court disqualified the fundamentalist party from polls.

An Election Commission spokesman said that the commission scrapped the registration of the party on receipt of the verdict of the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division and that a notification has been issued.

Jamaat’s registration was declared illegal in 2013 by a High Court bench saying that the party's ideology was contrary to Bangladesh's Constitution. The SC upheld that judgement when Jamaat challenged it in the apex court, reported The New Indian Express.

The extremist Islamist party is now battered, with most of its senior leaders executed in the past five years under 1971 war crimes. Jamaat was opposed to Bangladesh’s independence from West Pakistan and aided Pakistan’s troops in genocide.

Bangladesh’s post-independence government banned it, but subsequent regimes withdrew the ban, allowing the party to flourish.

It was a crucial partner in Zia’s four-party alliance of BNP in 2001, with two of its members, party chief Moti-ur-Rahman Nizami and secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujaheed becoming ministers.

The incumbent Awami League government came to power in 2008 on the promise of bringing justice to the 1971 victims and subsequently hanged both Nizami and Mujaheed along with other party biggies.